When Virgil Thomson looked back on his handpicked team of collaborators—onstage and off—he observed that their two overriding virtues were lack of pay and inexperience: “It was everybody’s first time. You see, in order to get something original and good you have to get somebody when he is young. After one or even one and a half successes, you are beginning to imitate yourself a little bit. And everybody worked free, except the cast. When you’re not paid, you always do a good job, you’re responsible, and there is no front office that can fire you. Or put his finger in your pie.”
The artists whom Thomson chose had no experience with opera but were passionately idiosyncratic in their respective crafts. Driven by the fact that they were pioneers, they made it up as they went along. “Stage directors, designers, costumers, and choreographers, all working along different stylistic lines,” Thomson later warned, “… will turn your work into a variety show.”1 But he knew that his collaborators’ lack of theatrical experience would allow him to dictate his own style, thereby preventing chaos onstage and retaining his commanding position offstage.
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Virgil Thomson met John Houseman at the suggestion of his friend Lewis Galantière in late November 1933, on Houseman’s first visit to the Askews’. By the end of that Sunday afternoon, Thomson considered him a likely candidate to direct his opera. “I thought he was out of his mind, frankly,” Houseman recalled, “but I was eager, and the opportunity was a golden one.” Houseman was thirty-one years old and had never directed a play in his life. Selling grain futures on Wall Street was his job, but Thomson quickly discerned other qualities in Houseman that would prove more important than theater experience: flexibility, cosmopolitan attitudes, an ability to deal with shifting finances, and, above all, taste. In Houseman’s words, his opera-related experience was all part of “the education of a chameleon.”
He had been born Jacques Haussmann in 1902 in Bucharest; by 1933 “Haussmann” had just begun to give way to “Houseman” (Thomson’s notebooks of the day use both, for example, and Houseman signed his letters both ways). Known in his family as “Fat Jack,” the youngster had been shuttled from grand hotels to shabby furnished rooms, where he had come to know extravagance but not security, and to English schools. By his teens he spoke several languages and had visited most of Europe’s major cities; by his twenties he had become acquainted with the Bloomsbury crowd in London.2 When he moved to New York, he quickly became involved with several prominent Greenwich Village residents: James Light of the Provincetown Players, e.e. cummings, and Edmund Wilson, among others. Entering his thirties, he became a successful grain merchant and married actress Zita Johann. By the time Thomson met him at the end of 1933, Houseman’s grain company had declared bankruptcy, his wife had left him, and Houseman was living in garretlike servant’s quarters on twenty dollars a week. At his lowest point in the Depression, Houseman was prone to self-flagellation in the third person: “He had had his big chance and muffed it.” But the failure of Houseman’s grain business also provided an opportunity to leave his respectable vocation for the theater. In less than a year he had coauthored four comedies. Although his writing was formulaic, his desire to establish himself in the theater propelled him forward, even though there was no immediate promise.3
Drawn to Houseman’s upper-class British accent and cosmopolitan upbringing, Thomson was taken with his observation that Four Saints sounded like something that Étienne de Beaumont could have produced at one of his Soirées de Paris.4 Summing up Houseman’s strategic virtues, Thomson observed, “His British rather wonderfully cool warmth, his considerate good manners, also British, and his elaborate cultural background in foreign letters and languages all went to make up a hand that he knew he could bid on.”5
The opera production demanded someone with Houseman’s intelligent flexibility to work with a temperamental crew. “I was there every minute, but my function was primarily as a producer,” Houseman said, then discreetly qualified this remark: “In the good sense of a producer.”
Houseman saw in Thomson “a small vivacious man several years older than myself, with a pale face, a piercing voice, precise articulation, and a willpower that became evident within thirty seconds of meeting.” The next morning Houseman heard Virgil sing the opera, accompanying himself on a piano at the Hotel Leonori. Two days later, Virgil officially invited him to join the production—in exchange for no money, no contract, and many headaches. Houseman responded, “It would be fun to try.” That he accepted immediately reflected both his vocational desperation and Thomson’s charisma. And he had nothing to lose.
As Houseman described his task in hindsight, it sounded daunting: “We had ten thousand dollars and nine and a half weeks in which to find a cast, coach and rehearse them in two hours of unfamiliar music and complicated stage action, execute scenery and costumes, rehearse a new score, move to Hartford into an unfinished theater with an orchestra of twenty and a cast of forty-three, set up, light, dress rehearse, and open cold before one of the world’s most sophisticated audiences. With the slightest theatrical experience I would have realized the impossibility of our task. In my total ignorance I assumed the job in a mood of irresistible euphoria.”
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During the rehearsals of Houseman’s forgettable comedy Three and One, he encountered “a pale-faced, garrulous, exhaustingly eager and ambitious young lighting expert.” At twenty-four, Abe Feder was already one of the most opinionated lighting designers around. His sureness owed something to his character and something to the fact that his profession was just being born. The theater bug had bitten Feder at thirteen, when he had sat in a balcony and watched a magician called the Great Thurston make people appear and disappear behind black curtains. “But what really fascinated me was the lights. Colored, dazzling lights all over the stage! I went home in a dream. I have been obsessed with light ever since. Other boys played with footballs and postage stamps. I played with light.”6 He pursued his fascination by taking sandwiches from his father’s delicatessen to the local theater, where he had a chance to observe the nuts and bolts of stagecraft.
At seventeen, Feder went to Pittsburgh to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology, a center for theater training. Because of his middling grades at West Side High, he was admitted on probation. Feder recalled that his admittance depended on a letter from his high school principal, and it read something like this:
My introduction to the young boy, as a freshman, was when he blew out the main fuse and when the police came they found this kid downstairs fooling around with some wire. From then on he was the bane of my existence. He was cutting holes in the ceiling and putting up curtains. All I can say is that he was the most talented kid during the four years he was there. I sure don’t want him to come back here, but I really don’t believe he will be a detriment.
Carnegie Tech offered no curriculum in lighting, which was not yet taught as a stage art, as the technical revolution that made the art of lighting design possible did not occur until the 1920s. One picked up lighting tips from electricians, and one of Feder’s mentors at Carnegie Tech concluded, “He’s going to have to learn on his own.” He moved from Carnegie to Yiddish Theater projects in the Bronx, and the same month that Houseman invited him to join Four Saints, Feder had made his Broadway lighting debut with Calling All Stars.
“Lighting, it’s in the marrow of my bones” was the way Feder explained his education. “To me light was something called the art of revealment.” He embedded his art in the technical mastery of gels, amperage, and bulbs. When he encountered his collaborators on Four Saints in Three Acts, he found them lacking in any nuts-and-bolts grounding in the theater. The two exceptions were his friend Teddy Thomas, who helped light the show, and Kate Drain Lawson, who supervised the technical production of costumes and sets. “Thank god for Kate Drain Lawson,” Feder said. “She brought law and order to that production.”
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Thomson met Four Saints’ conductor, Alexander Smallens, at the Askews’. Of all the collaborators, Smallens was the only one who was not new to the opera world. The forty-five-year-old musician had worked as the musical director of the Philadelphia Civic Opera and was currently assisting Leopold Stokowski at the Philadelphia Orchestra. Drawn to the project for its adventure and willing to conduct without a fee, he supported musical experimentation. He had conducted the American premieres of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and he appreciated attempts to break down the American musical establishment. The most difficult thing about Smallens was his temper, and when rehearsals did not go smoothly he could lose his equilibrium. In the unflattering words of John Houseman, “Smallens was a bully and a shouter.”
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At his first formal meeting with John Houseman, Virgil Thomson explained, “I don’t really want them to act. I want them to be moved.” But very few people in New York had any experience in directing opera, even of the most conventional sort, and none knew how to move singers. The star performers of the day generally owned their own costumes, developed their own interpretations, and neither required nor accepted much direction. “I knew it had to be done from scratch,” Thomson recalled. He was guided by a memory of seeing Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice in Kansas City, wherein singers from the Boston Opera Company had combined forces with Anna Pavlova and others had danced and mimed the story. Thomson had liked it so much that he decided to apply the “completely regulated spectacle” of the eighteenth-century opera-ballets to Four Saints. He thus required a choreographer not only for the two brief ballets but for the continuously patterned movements of the entire cast.
He recalled his meeting with Frederick Ashton a few months earlier and instantly decided to invite him to be the choreographer. Constance Askew paid for a cable communicating a parsimonious offer: Chick Austin would pay steerage-class fare, in lieu of a salary Ashton would be given ten dollars a week pocket money, and the Askews offered him one of the twin beds in their second-story guest room, to be shared with Thomson.
When Ashton arrived, he faced the opera’s challenge of choreographing movement for dancers who lacked formal ballet training; it was fortunate that not all the casts he had worked with had been as technically proficient as the Sadler’s Wells dancers. In the fall of 1933, he had staged dances for a short-lived musical called The Gay Hussar and a ragtag charity show called Nursery Murmurs. The minimally trained dancers from Liverpool’s Audrey Butterworth School had forced him to choreograph movements for amateurs. A dance colleague marveled at the lengths to which he would go to elicit the right movements from his dancers.
A year earlier, Ashton had had his first brush with black dance when he performed in a show called High Yellow. A trial run in reverse for choreographing Four Saints, it had offered Ashton the chance to dance a black role under the guidance of black choreographer Buddy Bradley. Ashton had not been convincing; producer C. B. Cochran observed that he had “remained a white man despite his make-up, and was far too self-conscious and absorbed with the fascination of ‘snaky hips’ to be convincing.” (Snaky Hips, a dance that emphasized a wildly gyrating pelvis, had been popularized in the late 1920s by Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker.) But High Yellow had given Ashton the opportunity to assimilate liquid, swiveling movements into his own corporal vocabulary.
Perhaps the most relevant experience Ashton brought to Four Saints was his own childhood in Peru. Some of the sharpest images in his repertory sprang from his childhood, when, immersed in Catholic ritual, he had assisted in high masses in Lima’s grand cathedral. As one of the few blonds in the congregation, he had been a favored acolyte. Ashton was, in fact, the only one of Four Saints’ behind-the-scenes collaborators who could confront the opera’s Catholic imagery without invoking irony or metaphor. Although he was not Catholic himself, the Catholic Church’s rituals were second nature to him. Virgil Thomson was fond of saying that Ashton was the perfect choreographer because he knew how nuns moved in procession. One such procession formed one of his first memories at the age of two, and he later witnessed informal processions that ranged from bevies of nuns in long habits to plump women in bright, slit skirts and tango shoes. “The thing that a choreographer really needs is an eye,” Ashton later said. “He has to do his training through his eye.”
“Although we were supposed to be English boys and there was an English colony in Lima, I never thought of England at all,” Ashton recalled. “It never entered my head.” When he returned to England in 1919, he spoke English with a Spanish accent and experienced public school as “an absolute desert.” At thirteen he saw Anna Pavlova on tour, dancing Fairy Doll, and later that evening he witnessed her stepping like a magical bird into a waiting cab. “She injected me with her poison, and from the end of that evening I wanted to dance,” he recalled. “Coming from middle-class parents, it was a horrifying thought.” In London, he took Saturday afternoon ballet lessons from Léonide Massine, spending a guinea (twenty-one shillings) per lesson from his thirty-shilling-a-week salary. When he tried to hide his dancing from his family, he became anxious, forgetful, and depressed. A doctor told his mother that unless he was allowed to dance he might end up in a psychiatric hospital. “That frightened her, and then she thought she’d better concede,” Ashton recalled. “Which she did, though all my family were outraged and even she could never bring herself to tell anyone that I was dancing. She always said I’d ‘gone on the stage’ instead.”
By December 1933, when Constance Askew cabled Ashton, inviting him to join the opera production, he had developed a prominent reputation in England. He choreographed primarily for Marie Rambert’s Ballet Club but also worked for the Camargo Society and the fledgling Vic-Wells company. Critic Arnold Haskell called him “the first young choreographer of importance to have emerged since the end of the Diaghilev era.” Ashton worked constantly, but the fact that he choreographed not only ballet but musicals and provincial charity shows suggests that he took many assignments to survive financially.
The premiere of Ashton’s ballet Les Rendezvous on December 5, 1933, was a fashionable event—the audience included dress designer Elsa Schiaparelli, fashionable interior decorator Syrie Maugham, and actress Constance Cummings. Ashton read the glowing reviews just before he sailed the next day on the Ile de France. He crossed the Atlantic with Maurice Grosser, Four Saints’ scenarist. Although Grosser had resigned himself to not seeing the opera for which he had written the scenario, at a propitious moment that fall he had sold a painting of an attractive sailor on Porquerolles Island. The sale had provided just enough to pay for the trip. On board Ashton and Grosser barely talked; it was a rough, cold passage, and they were mostly confined to their cabins. Ashton fantasized that he would be greeted by reporters and banks of orchids, but the Four Saints collaborators were too immersed in rehearsals and too poor for any such ceremony.
When Ashton and Grosser docked on December 12, rehearsals had already begun. Ashton was asked to choreograph two ballet divertissements (he called them “sniplets”)—a brief second-act ballet in which the angels practiced flying and a third-act tango for sailors and their Spanish ladies.7 Ashton needed to find three male and three female dancers. Harlem’s clubs and revues boasted a surfeit of black dancers, but none trained in ballet’s formal vocabulary.
Avoiding professional agents, Ashton was escorted through Harlem by Edward Perry, a black journalist with a nose for talent, and by singer Jimmie Daniels. He went to Lenox Avenue and 140th Street, where the Savoy Ballroom stretched a full block. “The Home of Happy Feet” was Harlem’s largest and most democratic dance hall. Two bands played every night, so the music never stopped, and the vast burnished-maple floor (50 feet wide and 250 feet long) featured the best nonprofessional dancers in New York. Tuesday night attracted the most serious dancers, known as the “400 Club,” who appreciated the expanse of floor available midweek. Ashton was unprepared for the explosive vitality and inventive range of the dancing he saw there. “Everybody went to the Savoy Ballroom, and very fancy stuff went on there,” Thomson recalled. “That was the Lindy Hop school.” Ashton saw couples Shim-Shamming and Trucking, dancing the Black Bottom and the Eagle Rock. Most of all he was amazed by the Lindy Hop, an updated version of the Texas Tommy that alternated a syncopated beat with improvised gyrating turns and breakneck pinwheel spins. When Ashton spied a promising dancer, Perry would approach him or her with a proposal to portray a dancing angel in a Gertrude Stein opera. “At first they thought we were pulling their legs,” Ashton recalled. Within a week, Ashton had engaged three men and three women. One of the male dancers was a lifeguard at Lido Beach, one was a boxer, and one drove a taxi and played basketball. The trio of female dancers could execute “fancy” social dance, and one was the daughter of another cast member. None had formal training.